Culture and Elegance. Man is born a barbarian and raises himself above the beastly by means of culture. Culture therefore makes the man; the more a man, the higher. Thanks to it, Greece could call the rest of the world barbarians. Ignorance is very raw; nothing contributes so much to culture as knowledge. But even knowledge is coarse if without elegance. Not alone must our intelligence be elegant, but our desires, and above all our conversation. Some men are naturally elegant in their internal and external qualities, in their thoughts, in their address, in their dress, which is the rind of the soul, and in their talent, which is its fruit. There are others, on the other hand, who are so crude that everything about them, even their excellences, is tarnished by an intolerable and barbaric disorder.

“He could be one of a million beach-bound, black-socked Florida retirees, not the man who, by some odd happenstance of life, possesses the brain of Albert Einstein — literally cut it out of the dead scientist's head.”